The M2M refers to all technologies and means of establishing connection among the machines. The M2M idea appears in 1990s last century, but it only remains at theory stage. After 2000, with the development of the mobile communication technology, it becomes possible to realize networking among the machine devices by the mobile communication technology. The M2M service appears in the market in about 2002 and develops rapidly in the subsequent several years, which becomes the focus of the numerous communication device traders and the telecommunication operators. Now, the quantity of machines in the global is much more than that of people, so the good market prospect of the M2M technology can be predicted.
The research on the M2M communication application scenarios indicates that providing the M2M communication in the mobile network has the potential market prospects. But the M2M service has put forward a lot of new requirements on the system, in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the mobile network in this respect, it is necessary to optimize the existing mobile network to support the M2M communication more effectively.
The existing mobile communication network is designed mainly aiming at the human-to-human communication, and the optimization on the communication of the machine-to-machine, the human-to-machine is insufficient. In addition, how can the operator provide the M2M communication service with the low cost is the key to success of the M2M communication deployment.
Because of the above-mentioned situations, it is necessary to research the solution that the mobile network supports the M2M communication and the solution should reuse the existing network to a high limit and reduce the influence on the network caused by the heavy M2M communication and the complexity of the operation maintenance.
The competition of the telecommunication market is becoming intense gradually at present, the expense is dropping constantly, the profit space of the operator is being reduced constantly, the communication market based on people is tending to the saturation, and the M2M is a brand-new development opportunity for the operator.
In order to utilize the mobile network resource effectively, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes the machine type communication (MTC), that is, the service of the M2M and the machine-to-man communication, of which the service scope has far gone beyond the communication of Human to Human (H2H) in the past, and the MTC has very great difference at the respects such as access control, charging, security, quality of service (QoS), the service mode, etc., from the current H2H communication mode.
The MTC Device Trigger (hereafter referred to as trigger) is one of the basic demand for the MTC system, and the problem that the demand pays close attention to is that: in order to control the communication of the MTC device, the communication can be performed by adopting the way that the MTC server initiates the poll; for the communication initiated by the MTC device, it also needs the MTC server to inquire data from the MTC device sometimes. If the MTC server inquires with failure or the IP address of the MTC device is not available, then the MTC server can establish the communication with the MTC device by using the trigger. If the network cannot trigger the MTC device, then the network reports to the MTC server that the trigger is failed, and the trigger is implemented through the control plane signaling in the 3GPP.
The short message service (SMS) is for sending information between the Short Message Entity (SME) and the user equipment through the Service Centre (SC). The SMS includes the Mobile Originated (MO) and the Mobile Terminating (MT) service, that is, including that the user equipment sends and receives information. The network framework of sending the short message is as shown in FIG. 1, including the SME and the short message service-service centre (SMS-SC) outside the 3GPP or the GSM network, including the short message-gateway mobile switching center (SMS GMSC) or the short message-interworking mobile switching center (SMS IWMSC), the SMS router, the mobile switching center (MSC) or the visitor location register (VLR) or serving General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) support node (SGSN), the mobile station (MS) within the 3GPP or GSM network.
In order to realize the effective transmission of the trigger request, the already proposed scheme includes: sending the trigger through the short message SMS, or sending the trigger through the control plane signaling. For the way of sending the trigger through the control plane signaling, the MTC server sends the control plane signaling including the trigger information to the network node, and the network node analyzes the trigger information in the control plane signaling and then sends the trigger information to the user equipment. The network framework that the SMS sends the MTC trigger adopted in the 3GPP is as shown in FIG. 2: the MTC device connects to the 3GPP-born service, the SMS or the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) through the air interface; the MTC server is connected to the MTC-IWF through the MTCsp interface, and is connected to the SMS-SC and the IP short message gateway (IP-SM-GW) through the MTCsms interface; and the MTC server is connected to the user equipment through the API interface.
Now only 2 items of the contents for the trigger information are confirmed in the 3GPP: the first is the MTC device identification, used for indicating the MTC device required to be triggered; the second is the validity time (VT), that is, the period for which the trigger information is kept in the 3GPP network; if this time is exceeded, then the 3GPP network deletes the trigger information.
In the SMS, the time that the SC keeps the short message is the Validity Period (VP), and the VP is set in the short message service submit (SMS-submit) message by the user equipment, to indicate, before the SC sends the short message to the receiving party, the time that the short message can be kept in the SC.
But in the related art, for sending the trigger information by adopting the SMS, how to set the VT in the trigger information in the SMS and how to process in network node that the SMS passes, etc., there is no definite solution.